


borders and horizon lines

by magneticwave



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: F/F, F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-07
Updated: 2014-02-07
Packaged: 2018-01-11 11:36:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,833
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1172598
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/magneticwave/pseuds/magneticwave
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Let me do this nice thing for you, Derek, no strings attached,” said nobody ever.</p>
            </blockquote>





	borders and horizon lines

**Author's Note:**

> A Halloween ghost story, kind of, mixed with the usual mid-season aggressive future fic speculation where everybody is (a) happy and (b) alive. On an unrelated note, somebody needs to take my laptop away from me before I drink too many rum & cokes and wake up married to the spell trope in Vegas.

Stiles likes to play a game with himself where he tries to guess who is calling him before he checks the caller ID. He wins at least fourteen times out of fifteen, because his dad and Dr. Deaton are the only people he knows who don’t text and Deaton basically only calls Scott.

Yanking out one of his earbuds, Stiles announces to the universe at large, “Dad,” and tilts his phone so he can see if he’s right.

 _DICK WOLF_ , says Stiles’ phone, still buzzing aggressively. Peaches has made it out of the intro and is singing, “Sucking on my titties like you wanted me,” which has the girl sitting at the next table over shooting Stiles a dirty look, and still Stiles is staring.

 _Sorry_ , Stiles mouths at her. It takes him four more seconds to get over the shock enough to accept the call. “Derek?” he says cautiously. He literally can’t remember the last time Derek called him, probably because it’s never happened before.

There’s a long pause, and then Derek says, “Thank fucking Christ.”

“Did you just take our lord and savior’s name in vain?” Stiles asks. He’s never heard Derek say _fuck_ before. He kind of wishes he’d been there in person, to see Derek’s lips shape around the word. Stiles has, over the last five years, developed a very good sense of how good somebody is at a blowjob, based on what their mouth does to _fuck_.

“What?” Derek says, sounding distracted. “Never mind. You need to come over.”

Even though Derek is two thousand miles away, Stiles still makes a show of looking down at the notes spread across his table, up at the girl now angrily returned to her laptop, and then finally in a long sweep down the line of the room. “Right,” Stiles says. “I’ll get on that.” If he were still pissed off at Derek about wrecking Isaac’s apartment, this would be when he hangs up. Curiosity has always killed the Stiles, though, so he stays on the line.

“ _Stiles_ ,” Derek says. He sounds exasperated, which is not shocking, but there’s also something Stiles can’t dissect in his tone. It’s definitely unfamiliar. Derek doesn’t talk enough for Stiles to be good at interpreting his mood from that alone; his face is much more expressive.

“ _Derek_ ,” Stiles mimics. The girl at the next table over looks up again and stares at Stiles, clenching her hand repeatedly around a mechanical pencil. She looks kind of like Victoria Argent, in that Stiles now has no doubt that she’d be willing to stab him with it to get him to shut up. “I’ll be back for fall break in a week,” Stiles says. “If it’s something more urgent than that, call Scott. This is literally what he’s for.”

At the other end of the line, Derek asks, “What the hell is Scott going to do?”

“I don’t know,” Stiles says, “whatever Scott always does. Save the day, somehow.” He’s now sincerely worried about being murdered by that girl. “Listen, I have to go. Call Scott if you think there’s a problem, and I’ll be back in a week. Six days.”

“But—” Derek says, and Stiles hangs up. He purposely slides his phone to silent and waggles it in the girl’s direction to show her; she lowers her eyebrows, frowns at him aggressively, and returns to her work. Eventually, when Stiles can yank himself back from imagining what has Derek in such a tizzy that he’s calling Stiles directly, as opposed to putting on his trusty old leather jacket and going to loiter outside Beacon Hills Memorial until Scott goes on break, Stiles gets back to work, too.

~

For reasons purely of convenience and real estate costs, Cora and Stiles are sharing an apartment in Chicago. Stiles is at Northwestern, ostensibly getting his PhD in Medieval Literature but in reality sitting at the feet of the emissary of the Camirand pack and soaking up as much knowledge as he can scribble into a vast collection of composition notebooks; Cora is at U of Chicago, actually getting her masters in psychology. They live smack in the middle between Evanston and the South Loop, and their lengthy commutes mean that they never see each other, which is the only way that they’ve managed to survive a year and a half as roommates.

Stiles comes back from the library after his absurd phone call interlude with Derek to find Cora on the couch, watching old episodes of _The Mindy Project_ on her laptop with a gigantic bowl of red grapes in her lap.

“Gross,” Stiles says reflexively. Who eats red grapes when the Dominick’s down the street sells perfectly good green ones? Nobody, because red grapes are disgusting.

“This is why we have a roommate agreement,” says Cora without looking up from her laptop. “So I can eat whatever damn fruit I want and you have to deal.”

Because Stiles is perfectly aware that his opinions re: various fruits matter only to him, he lets the grapes thing go. “I’m pissed off at your brother,” he announces, and Cora responds by snorting and stuffing four grapes into her mouth at once. “Not about the Isaac thing,” Stiles clarifies, although he is still pretty mad about Derek getting Isaac evicted. “Something entirely new.”

“Still not news,” Cora mutters.

“He _called_ me today,” Stiles continues. He kicks off his Vans and goes into the kitchen to grab a beer from the fridge, adding, “Like, on a phone. Who does that? If you have thumbs and are under forty, why would you _ever_ call anybody?”

“Derek’s soul isn’t under forty,” Cora says. Mindy Kaling’s voice cuts out in the middle of a joke; Cora must be at least a little worried, if she’s pausing her show to listen to Stiles. Cora usually makes a point to ignore him when they’re both home, in order to show that she’s the superior one. Stiles thinks that that is probably a Hale thing.

“Well, he called,” Stiles says, now stubbornly invested in sharing his story. “I was in the library and I thought this girl was going to kill me. I answered, because it’s freaking Beacon Hills and, like, 90% of the time somebody is calling to tell me that my best friend has been nearly murdered by a rogue clan of, whatever, hags or something, but it turns out Derek just wanted to tell me to come home. No context, just _come home, Stiles_. Right, because plane tickets grow on trees and are easily harvested at a moment’s notice.”

As Stiles digs through the drawer next to the sink for a bottle opener, Cora asks, “Did he tell you why?”

“ _No_ ,” Stiles huffs. He finally manages to unearth the bottle opener from inside a set of measuring cups; what the hell, Cora. “I told him that I’ll be home in a week for fall break. I come back every year for Halloween. This is not something difficult to remember, I do it _literally every year_ and I sent everybody an email last week reminding them to cut out a lock of hair for me.”

“Shit,” Cora mutters.

“You forgot, didn’t you?” Stiles has ceased to be surprised by Cora’s forgetfulness. She leaves Post-Its to herself everywhere, including inside the fridge (BUY MORE MUSTARD, on the half-gallon jug of 2% milk) and on a bottle of apricot scrub (USE ONLY MON & WED) in the shower. He hasn’t seen one with CUT HAIR FOR HALLOWEEN anywhere, so it stands to reason that she’s forgotten.

Cora comes into the kitchen, carrying her bowl. “Can we do it now? Do we have any red ribbon?”

“Yeah, I’ve got some in my room,” Stiles says. He chugs half of his bottle of Goose Island and puts it down on the counter, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “Do you have a pair of silver scissors, or do you need mine?”

“Why the hell would I have silver scissors,” she says, so Stiles leaves her to wash out the bowl that had previously contained her bitter demon fruit and goes to find a length of red ribbon and the tiny pair of silver scissors that he uses to trim the wolfsbane plant he has in a window box overlooking the fire escape. By the time he’s trimmed a lock of Cora’s hair and tied it into a loosely knotted ring with the ribbon, his irritation with Derek has diminished. Stiles can deal with Derek in a week.

~

The second that Stiles steps off his plane in Sacramento, he sends out an MMS with a second, final reminder that he needs rings of hair from everybody and if he doesn’t have thirteen by the time he wakes up the next morning he’s going to do something drastic.

 _Like what_ , Scott sends back, to Stiles alone. _Hug us to death? Also, where are you?_

Scott is waiting next to baggage claim in a Dunkin Donuts that looks like it’s been vomited on by the spirit of Halloween. Everything as far as the eye can see is orange and black. Proof positive that American capitalist brainwashing works, Stiles has a sudden, Pavlovian urge to eat a million Halloween-themed donuts.

“Dude!” Scott says, reeling Stiles in for a hug. “What the hell happened to your hair?”

Stiles resists the compulsion to run a palm over his scalp, and instead rubs his knuckles into Scott’s chin. “Got something in it, needed to cut it out. More importantly, what the hell is this?” Scott’s rocking a goatee and it looks surprisingly good, considering that Stiles has always thought goatees were for people like Peter Hale who’d given up on not looking like douchecastles.

“I had a couple of night shifts and didn’t shave. Decided to keep it,” Scott says with a shrug. “I thought you liked the long hair, though. You haven’t buzzed it in years.”

“Stop obsessing over my hair, dude,” Stiles says, gently pushing Scott away. “It’s fine, it’ll grow out again. The Camirand emissary has a five-year-old and she spit gum at me.”

Scott asks, “On purpose?” with a grin. “I’m parked in the short-term garage, come on.”

“No, not on purpose,” Stiles says. “I am affronted by your lack of faith in my ability to make children love me. Maylis adores me. I’m her favorite person ever.” That is mostly because Stiles will play Dentist Barbie with her when her parents are busy, but Stiles will take what he can get. Besides, she’d cried when he cut his hair, so he’s not going to let her take the blame for it.

Even though they text every day and Skype a few times a month, Scott and Stiles spend the drive back to Beacon Hills catching up on whatever’s been happening since Stiles’ last visit in August. Danny and Liam got suckered by Deaton into adopting a kitten, which has understandably sent Danny “Commitment Issues” Mahealani into a downward spiral; Jackson and Kira’s competition to be the best intern at Whittemore, Whittemore & Kapoor has now extended to also being the best at bowling, football commentary, and, bizarrely, Halloween decorating; Allison’s cousin Greg is back in town.

“What,” says Stiles flatly, and then: “I thought we agreed Greg wasn’t ever again going to be allowed entrance to the freaking state of California!”

Scott winces. “Allison needs him to take a job in Ottawa and it makes her look weak, if she has to go to him and ask instead of summoning him to her. He’s only here until tomorrow, I promise.”

“If I see him,” Stiles threatens, “I will unleash _hell_.”

Stiles is mature enough, now, to know how to deal with his exes without turning the entire situation into a _Footloose_ -level case of overreaction. Stiles had not known how to do that when he and Greg became no longer a thing.

“Allison says he doesn’t do serial infidelity now,” Scott offers, like Stiles cares about that at all.

“Still an asshole,” Stiles says. If he backs down now, after five years of wishing Greg a violent and bloody death, it’s like he’s admitting that he’d been wrong to throw a take-out container of shumai at Greg’s head when he’d found out about the cheating in the first place. Stiles is not a big fan of admitting to being wrong, especially when he was totally right.

~

The second that Stiles sees Greg and Allison sitting on the porch of the tiny duplex that Allison and Scott own half of, he says in a tone of deep betrayal, “ _Dude_.”

“Shit, sorry,” Scott says, eyes darting from the porch to the road in front of him and then back again. Instead of turning into his own driveway, he continues past the house. Allison and Greg watch them as they pass, going 15 because Beacon Hills Elementary is a block over; Allison looks impassive, as befitting the head of the Argents, and Greg is a weird combination of embarrassed and upset. Maybe he doesn’t want to go to Ottawa. It’d serve him right.

“I hope he goes to Canada and dies of frostbite,” Stiles says to Scott. “Hey, just drop me off at the loft, Cora wants me to pick up one of her undergrad textbooks. I might as well do that now, since Dad is working a Mischief Night double and dinner with my best friend and his concubines is clearly out, now.”

“One day,” Scott says, “you’re going to call Allison a concubine to her face and she’s going to shoot you.” He takes a left onto Boulevard, back towards the center of town and Derek’s loft. “I'm sorry about dinner. I didn’t know he’d still be at our house; he’s staying at the Renaissance off of I-5.”

A more generous person might point out that Greg undoubtedly wanted to spend time with his cousin, but Stiles isn’t feeling particularly generous at the moment. “Whatever,” he says. “I’ll be back at Christmas, we can do dinner then.”

“Seriously?” Scott says. “ _Christmas_? That’s like two months away.”

“You’re working every night this weekend,” Stiles reminds him. “Unlike the rest of us lazy assholes, you chose to get a job helping people. That means you don’t get to have dinner with your best friend when he drops into town for a few days.”

“Lunch tomorrow?” Scott suggests. “I don’t have to be at the hospital until four.”

“Fine,” Stiles allows graciously. “Lunch it is. Pick me up at noon.” As Scott pulls into the parking lot outside the series of repurposed mill buildings that now serve as gentrified hipster housing, Stiles adds, “There better be apology-grade curly fries present.”

“Stop milking your break up,” Scott says, punching Stiles in the shoulder with a grin. “You don’t love him and you guys split up five years ago.”

“I am tragically offended,” Stiles informs Scott as he steps out of the car, slinging his backpack full of underwear and socks over his shoulder. “What happened to respecting my emotions, Scott McCall?”

Scott is outright laughing as Stiles slams the passenger door shut. Stiles flips him off in a friendly way and goes to break into Derek’s apartment. It’s good to know that even after seven years of residency Derek still doesn’t employ basic security measures like a deadbolt on the front door of the building. He has a giant angry buzzer for when the door opens, but not a lock.

“Derek,” Stiles yells as he slides the door to Derek’s apartment open. It isn’t locked, either. “Are you fucking kidding me? You better not be dead, dickwipe.”

Derek is standing at the other end of the room, in front of the giant, dramatic windows that he has to replace every few years because something supernatural decides to crash through them in the course of trying to kill various members of the McCall pack. “Stiles,” he says.

“Yeah,” Stiles replies. “Me. Cora needs one of her stat textbooks from undergrad, she asked me to pick it up. Why’d you call me last week?” He drops his backpack to the ground and makes a beeline for the bookshelves that Derek is using to separate off the kitchen from the rest of the lower floor.

“You’re here,” Derek says. He’s still standing in front of the windows, which isn’t surprising. “You—can see me.”

“Um,” Stiles says, “yeah.” He crouches down in front of the bookshelf closest to the couch and squints, trying to read the titles of the various brightly colored textbooks piled there. Cora isn’t a big believer in alphabetical organization. “She wants _Statistical Methodology and Developing Model Systems_ , do you know where that one is?”

When he looks up, Derek has come a couple of steps closer. His face is unreadable, eyes blown open and mouth tight underneath a dense, neat beard. “Hey,” Stiles says slowly, climbing to his feet. “Are you okay?”

“No,” Derek says, and then, maddeningly, stops.

Stiles waits four whole seconds, which is three seconds more than he’d wait for anybody else with fully developed conversation skills, before demanding, “Well?”

“I’m—something’s wrong,” Derek says. He steps towards Stiles and then stops again, three feet away, next to the beaten up leather armchair that Cora and Lydia had given Derek for Christmas five years ago as a kind of _please stop being so pathetic, we’re embarrassed to know you_ present. He makes eye contact with Stiles and then leans down, putting his hand on the back of the chair. While Stiles watches, Derek pushes his hand through the chair, the flesh of his arm disappearing like the leather is a pool of water.

“Holy _shit_ ,” Stiles croaks, stumbling backwards and banging into the bookshelf. A bunch of books tumble off of the shelf closest to his head, banging into his shoulders and chest as they crash to the floor.

“I think I’m a ghost,” Derek says. After a moment he adds, “And you _hung up on me_ , asshole.”

~

Stiles has to walk through Derek four times to believe him, each step running a little shivery cold drop down his spine. It’s the wrong kind of intimate, to walk through somebody. Stiles’ brain has been trained to stop so that Stiles’ face exists a certain distance away from Derek’s at all times, as a defensive reflex. Walking through him is like kissing him, without the associated pleasantness.

“Wow,” Stiles finally says, when he’s finished his fourth lap through Derek and he’s relocated to the couch. His knees feel like their cartilage has been melted. “So. You’re a ghost.”

“Yes,” Derek snarls, “thank you, got that.”

“Did you—die?” Stiles asks stiltedly. They’ve never dealt with ghosts before, so Stiles has no idea how this process works. When people don’t stay dead, in Beacon Hills, they usually come back in one full thrust; there’s none of this wishy-washy incorporeal body business.

“No,” Derek says.

Stiles gestures at Derek. “So, what, your body melted off? You woke up one day and your atoms just decided to exist on another plane?”

“When I want your opinion on multidimensional physics, I’ll ask for it,” Derek says snippily. Ever since Stiles had browbeaten Derek into admitting he’d majored in engineering at NYU and been in the process of attending Columbia for his masters before coming back to Beacon Hills, Derek has delighted in taking potshots at Stiles’ somewhat shitty ( _in comparison_ ) grasp of complex mathematics.

“What the hell am I doing here, if not offering my opinion?” Stiles points out. “I thought ghosts were on that list, you know, the one with vampires? The one that I’ve mentally labeled as ‘Not Even In The Hellscape That Is Beacon Hills.’”

“I’m not dead,” Derek repeats aggressively. “This happened gradually.”

“People can die gradually,” Stiles says, and to his credit it doesn’t come out half as brutally as it might’ve even three years ago.

If he’d been Scott, or Allison, or even Lydia, Derek might have paused at that and given Stiles a _look_ —Stiles had gotten it at every major family gathering for the two years directly following his mom’s funeral, before he’d taken a series of accidentally terrible school photos and realized that being the Weird Cousin was much less hassle than being the Cousin With a Dead Mom—but Derek is in all things the opposite of delicate.

“Not like this.” He points to the end table next to the couch, where his iPhone is sitting while charging. “I could touch that up until two days ago, but I haven’t been able to open a door in a week.”

“Whoa,” Stiles says. He leans over and touches Derek’s phone, maybe to see if it also has been turned into ectoplasm, but it’s warm under his hands, overheated from being plugged in for too long. “When was the last time you were able to do—you know, everything?” He twists himself over the back of the couch and unplugs the phone charger from the wall socket.

Derek says, “I don’t know, maybe last week? I don’t go out a lot.”

“Trust me,” Stiles tells him, “I know.” He thumbs open the lockscreen on Derek’s phone and finds four unread texts, three of which are angry emojis from Isaac. The fourth is from Cora, dated the day after Stiles came home in a tizzy from the library. _Stiles is on the warpath, idiot_. “Cora didn’t say anything about you not texting her back.”

“I don’t text a lot,” Derek says dismissively. He’s standing in front of the big windows across from Stiles, staring out into the parking lot, with his arms crossed over his chest. “If it’s an emergency she knows I’ll respond.”

This entire clusterfuck is literally _exactly_ why that modus operandi is a terrible idea. “So when did you last use a door successfully?” Stiles asks, instead of, _Maybe if you responded to texts we would’ve known something was wrong a week ago._

Derek frowns, clearly having to think it through. Because of the angle, Stiles can’t see whether or not he has a reflection. Stiles understands why it’d be difficult to pinpoint when things started to go wrong, as Derek’s loft is purposely laid out for somebody who prefers not to have to deal with doors and stairs. Stiles doesn’t even know where the spiral staircase in the corner leads; he’s seen Derek walk down it, and Isaac lounge on it attractively, but it must have a purpose beyond being a conveniently dramatic prop.

“I went to the farmer’s market last Saturday,” Derek finally says. He appears to have given up on soulfully gazing out over the horizon and is now pacing in circles, moving closer to Stiles. “When I woke up on Sunday I couldn’t go upstairs, which is when I called you. After you hung up, I could still hold the phone but I couldn’t dial anything. It makes sense; the touch screen is a capacitor.”

Even though Stiles has made it his life’s business to be as free from regrets as possible, he feels the tiniest bit guilty about hanging up on Derek, now. “But why did you call me?” Stiles asks. “I mean, Scott’s the closest. I know you guys are having some kind of cold war détente over Isaac’s eviction but it’s not like he’d leave you stranded.” Stiles would’ve, if he’d been the one evicted because Derek cut a hole in a load-bearing wall of his apartment building to entrap a nest of pixies, but Stiles has never claimed to be a nice person.

 “I don’t know,” Derek says. “I could feel something going wrong. You’re—the magic expert.” Because Derek is a terrible liar, Stiles can immediately tell that he’s full of shit.

“Right,” Stiles says, adding that to the list of stuff he’s not going to bitch Derek out about until he’s corporeal again. “And you haven’t done anything recently that might explain this. Have you dicked any witches lately?” The look Derek shoots him at this is textbook-level withering. “Any dryads pissed off in the Preserve? Chupacabras, kelpies, brownies, ghouls, unicorns?”

“Are you just going to list everything in the bestiary for me?” Derek demands, throwing his hands in the air. “ _No_ , Stiles, nothing has come for the Nemeton since the satyrs in August.”

“Awesome,” Stiles says. “I love starting from scratch.” He arches off of the couch enough to pull his phone out of the back pocket of his jeans. “Time to call in the cavalry, then?”

“You think?” Derek snaps, and he crosses his arms again and deliberately returns to glowering. He steps around the leather chair, and then the desk in front of the window, even though Stiles now has proof that Derek could walk through those things like mist.

It seems tragically unfair that this is the kind of experience Derek isn’t going to take advantage of, but it’s always Derek that ends up whammied by mystical evil-doing in Beacon Hills. He’s never stopped being a magnet for tragedy, even though he’s patched up that hole in the wall and he’d ripped up the floorboards a few years ago and traded them out for new ones, sans the water damage.

“How is this your life?” Stiles marvels as he navigates to the favorites in his phone. He can call Scott to activate the Beacon Hills supernatural phone tree and then he’ll need to call Lydia and Cora separately. This process has been streamlined by years of practice. “I’m the one with a dark tumor on my soul and I don’t have half the problems that you do.”

Derek says nothing so pointedly that Stiles can feel it.

“I’m just saying,” Stiles says, pressing Scott’s name and lifting his phone to his ear. “Darkness. On my soul. And yet nobody’s tried to turn me into a ghost yet.”

“Do you want a cookie?” Derek asks.

Scott answers with a tentative, “Hey?” which probably means Greg is within earshot.

“Hey, dude,” Stiles says. “We’ve got an issue at Derek’s. I’m going to call Lydia and Cora to arrange for a study group, but I thought I’d let you know.”

“Do you need us?” Scott asks. “We can—get over there, if it’s something you need.” He sounds like he’s trying to avoid using words that would tell Greg that something is wrong, but Scott has a baseline awkwardness with subterfuge that always manages to come through in times like this.

“Just stay ready. Come by if you ever manage to get that cesspool sack of shit out of your house,” Stiles says. “I’m going to call Cora and Lydia. Enjoy your dinner.”

“Hey!” Scott protests, probably at the bitterness that Stiles can’t keep out of his voice, but Stiles hangs up on him and dials Cora instead. Lydia had come to Chicago for the weekend, to take advantage of Stiles being out of the apartment to presumably have loud and inexplicably elegant sex with Cora on every piece of furniture in the public living spaces; Stiles hopes they’ll actually answer.

He gets Cora’s voicemail, of course, which she rarely checks. He leaves her a voicemail asking them to call him back and then sends her a text message with five more exclamation points than necessary, to give her a gauge of importance. “All right,” he tells Derek, sliding his phone back into his pocket. “Let’s do an incident summary.”

It turns out that Stiles can see Derek’s reflection in the window; Derek makes a face.

“Yeah, big guy, I know,” Stiles says as he makes for his bag and his laptop. “Your life is really fucking hard.”

~

Lydia and Stiles have a Dropbox that they share where they store the electronic copy of the bestiary and the incident reports that Lydia had started after the weirdest of the freaky shit had begun to converge on Beacon Hills like the worst season finale of _Buffy_ in the history of ever.

She’d been the one to develop the protocols and worksheets for their expansion of the bestiary into something actually usable. Stiles has filled out so many incident summaries now that he can probably do one in his sleep: cataloguing dates and GPS coordinates for rudimentary timelines and plugging them into the generator that Danny had coded up for compiling the lunar calendar and ley lines.

Derek bitches through the entire process, probably because his laptop is still in his desk, untouched, while Stiles works on his MacBook. It could also be because he hasn’t had to fill out an incident summary in a long time; the bad things that happen to Derek usually result in somebody else finding his bloody body and having to fill in the blanks themselves.

“You’re fucking textbook damsel in distress,” Stiles informs him as he uses Google Maps to plot Derek’s drive home from the farmer’s market on Saturday. “Did you take a left on Parkside, then up Bates to the Target?”

“Left on Parkside, right on Bates, and then I drove along the preserve on South Neville. I wanted to avoid the traffic by the mall.” He gives Stiles an unimpressed look. “You’ve lived here your entire life; you should know that Target is obnoxious on Saturdays.”

Stiles makes a face and says, “Nyah nyah Target sucks and I hate major corporations because I want to live in a hut in the woods and build my own circuit boards. Yeah, whatever.” He inputs the GPS coordinates of each corner into Danny’s program and approximates the times based on Derek’s usual speed of 10 above the posted limits.

As Danny’s program runs and spits out a spreadsheet of times, coordinates, and associated supernatural eco-geographical factors that Stiles only pretends to fully understand—Stiles is great at research but he is not so great at statistical analysis; that’s why they have Lydia, and Derek when he hasn’t been gutted by angry unicorns and left to bleed to death on the side of the road—Stiles straightens up and cracks his back.

The program is designed to highlight anything that looks particularly dangerous, but all of the spreadsheet comes out normal. “Nothing obvious,” Stiles sighs. “Of course. This would be too easy if it were obvious.”

“The universe is not actually here just to thwart you,” Derek snips. That barely even makes sense, since clearly _Derek_ is the one who’s been fucked in this situation, but Stiles makes allowances for Derek being pissy about the whole ghost thing and decides not to comment.

As there’s nothing for him to do until Cora and Lydia decide to stop having sex and join the smart people party, Stiles gets up to make himself a cup of tea and reorganize the books that had fallen off of the shelves during Derek’s grand reveal. He finds _Statistical Methodology and Developing Model Systems_ at the bottom of the pile, of course, and then he goes and burns himself on Derek’s stupid, pissy electric kettle.

“Does your apartment hate me?” Stiles shouts over his shoulder, around the smarting finger he’s stuck in his mouth. Hot water has splashed over the rim of the mug to pool around its base; Stiles licks the burn on his finger as he lets the sponge from the sink soak up the spilled tea.

He nearly splatters the hot liquid all over himself as Scott says behind him, “What?”

“Oh my _fucking_ god,” Stiles howls, clearing a foot off of the tile floor and throwing the sponge defensively at Scott. “Christ, warn somebody, will you?”

“Where’s Derek?” Scott asks as he plucks the sponge out of midair. “Or were you talking to yourself?”

“He was in the living room a minute ago,” Stiles says. “Having _delicate feelings_.”

“Fuck you,” Derek says, coming to stand in the doorway that’s been constructed out of negative space between two bookshelves.

“Right back at you, big guy,” Stiles says, shooting Derek a finger gun with his uninjured hand. “Do you have any Neosporin?”

“Um, no,” Scott says, as Derek replies, “Under the sink in the bathroom.”

“Cool,” Stiles says. “Can you do the thing for Scott? I’m going to go treat my battle wound.”

“What are you talking about?” Scott asks as Stiles leaves the kitchen, deliberately flailing an elbow so it passes through Derek’s chest. A little cold trickle of hate flows down Stiles’ back, accompanied by Derek’s angry glare.

“It’s cool!” Stiles promises. “Just watch the leather chair very, very carefully.”

Scott’s confused, “What? Stiles, stop being mysterious, you’re shitty at it,” trails Stiles to the bathroom.

Stiles comes back from the bathroom to find Scott sitting on the couch, staring at the leather chair as Derek repeatedly kicks it, his foot passing clear through the seat with each swing. “Jesus, anger issues much?” Stiles asks. He almost goes in for a back slap, before he remembers that Derek is a bundle of cold ectoplasm now.

“He can’t _see_ me,” Derek says.

“What am I supposed to be looking at?” Scott asks Stiles, still staring at the leather chair. “Because nothing has happened. Is this a joke? I know you’re mad about the Greg thing, but this is a pretty ridiculous revenge.”

“This isn’t revenge,” Stiles says, pointing at Derek’s body. “Do you really not see him?”

“Stiles, I literally _just told you_ ,” Derek hisses through his teeth.

Scott’s eyes follow the line of Stiles’ arm and then he frowns and says, “I don’t see anything. If you mean Derek, by the way—I can’t smell him. Or hear him. Is it some kind of invisibility spell? It’s really, really effective.”

“Derek is a ghost,” Stiles says with extreme relish. “He keeps kicking the chair and passing right through it. Dude, I can’t believe you can’t see him. It’s _awesome_. Oh, stop fucking glaring at me like that. I’m allowed to appreciate the cool side of the mystical shit that happens to you.”

“If Derek is a ghost, where’s his body?” Scott asks. Bless Scott, always the practical one. He looks a little sad that Derek is dead. Stiles knows that Scott and Derek have gotten close—it’d have been basically impossible to be less close than they’d been eight years ago, Scott ready to let Derek die inasmuch as Scott was ever willing to let somebody be cannon fodder, and Derek being angsty about it in his journal—but he can see the evidence of that relationship now in how badly Scott appears to be taking Derek’s death.

“That’s the best part,” Stiles says. “You know how ghosts aren’t real?”

“Wait, you just said that—” Scott tries.

“I know, I know,” Stiles interrupts. “Derek became one with the astral plane or something. Ghosts still aren’t real, I think? I hope. But Derek’s become a spirit or something and his body melted with him. We’re still having a hard time figuring it out, and Lydia and Cora won’t pick up the freaking phone.”

Scott looks at Stiles, the leather chair, the pile of textbooks neatly stacked on the floor by the kitchen with _Statistical Methodology and Developing Model Systems_ now at the top, and then at the spiral staircase. “Okay,” he finally says. “I’m going to call Allison and Isaac. Have you tried either Cora or Lydia lately? And—text Danny.”

“On it, boss man,” Stiles replies with a brisk salute. “This is a good look for you.”

“What?” Scott says as he fishes his phone out of his pocket. “Authority?”

“Well, yeah,” Stiles says. “I meant the goatee, but the authority is always very attractive. I get why your milkshake brings both Isaac and Allison to the yard.”

Scott tries to repress a grin and fails. “Stiles, please shut up about my milkshake.”

~

Even though Stiles had spent most of undergrad maliciously and unrepentantly teasing Scott for double-majoring in nursing and communications along with every other size-two blonde cheerleader at UCLA, he’s grateful for the payout when Scott manages to pull together a plan in half the time it would have taken them in high school, with about 10% of the bitching that such plan-making would have elicited all those years ago.

Some time between when Scott begins making calls and Allison and Isaac show up with five boxes of pizza and a two-liter bottle of Diet Pepsi for Stiles’ personal use, Lydia and Cora hop on a plane back home, paying through the nose for it and Lydia blithely assuring Stiles that Jackson’s bank account can take the damage. Around the same time, Danny drags himself, a bunch of computers, and Liam to the loft. Derek gets frustrated at being constantly walked through and angrily floats in the corner between his bed and the corner, alternately staring balefully at everyone and snarling bitchy asides to Stiles.

Grateful to have someone on site who knows what the hell they’re doing, Stiles passes off the little work he and Derek had put into compiling an incident report and goes to do what he’d actually come to Beacon Hills for in the first place, which is the yearly renewing of wards for Halloween. As emissary, Deaton technically isn’t allowed to do this—“It is rather obviously not a balancing force,” he’d said wryly, years ago, when Stiles and Lydia had waved around a very badly translated copy of a Gaelic spell that they’d gotten off of a forum for the supernatural in the Pacific Northwest—so Stiles has done it for the past six years with varying effectiveness.

The more stable the pack becomes, the better the wards around the Nemeton hold. Although they’d all stayed in California and Oregon for undergrad, within a three hour-drive in case of supernatural shenanigans, the wards had become powerful enough by graduation for Stiles, Cora, and Lydia to go further—Stiles and Cora to Chicago, Lydia to Boston. They now only get one or two major problems a year, which means Stiles doesn’t have to bankrupt himself flying home when something terrible happens, like the selkies that had started aggressively seducing people in the middle of finals week two years ago.

Halloween always takes a lot out of Stiles, but he’s got a lot to give. He loves the people that he loves, and he’d do anything for them. That used to just be Scott and his dad, but despite the dark hole in the corner of Stiles’ soul, he’s still capable of forming terrifying strong bonds with the members of their ragtag pack of misfits.

“Please tell me you cut a circle of hair before—this,” Stiles says to Derek, waving a hand to indicate Derek’s current lack of a body. The floating thing is new; Derek still has feet, but they’re hovering a few inches above the floorboards, like gravity has given up on Derek getting his body back. It’s a little worrisome, if Stiles thinks about it too hard.

“Yes,” Derek bites out, eyes focused on Danny’s shoulders across the room. Liam is putting pushpins onto a laminated map of Beacon Hills as Danny types and occasionally calls out GPS coordinates. “In the bedside drawer.”

“Cool,” Stiles says. He’ll get the hair when he needs it. “You know, staring at Danny and Liam isn’t going to make them any more able to see you.”

“Really,” Derek says, turning his angry glare on Stiles. “You don’t say? Tell me more.”

Stiles holds up both palms in a don’t-sue-me kind of gesture and then he leaves Derek to angrily project in peace and returns to his notebook. He has to rewrite the spell every year to accommodate any major changes, and poetry and sincerity are so far from being Stiles’ thing that they might as well be complex mathematics.

Technically, the chant doesn’t have to rhyme, but Stiles likes it when the spell flows as smoothly as possible; it reduces the likelihood of him fucking up some element of the ritual. He never has as much time as he wants to set the spell because Halloween is an all-access pass to stupidity for the children of Beacon Hills and the preserve is always crawling with the little fuckers.

“What rhymes with pregnant?” he asks Derek, not looking up from his notebook. He taps his pen thoughtfully against his lower lip. “I mean, I could use ‘with child’ and—mild? Wild? Other wiled? Filed? Mile’d?” Allison isn’t pregnant yet, as far as Stiles knows, but she and Scott and Isaac have been trying for a few months now and Stiles doesn’t want to leave a future baby out of the wards. “Ugh, procreation is shit on my rhyming scheme.”

“We feel for you,” Danny and Derek say in unison. Predictably, Stiles is the only one to find that hilarious.

Stiles settles on ‘mild,’ although Derek peers over his shoulder and suggests that the wording of “threats remain mild” is ambiguous.

“Thank god nobody asked you to write this spell, then,” Stiles says. “Go do something ghostly, like, over in another corner.”

~

It ends up being Kira who says, when Stiles is down to the scant dregs of his Diet Pepsi and Lydia and Cora have arrived with Louis Vuitton travel bags and Prada in tow, “Derek, why were you in Bishop’s Corner on Friday?” She’s holding the printout of Derek’s schedule and movements for the last week.

Stiles, who is on his third draft of the Halloween spell and hating everything that vaguely resembles a rhyming scheme, looks up in tandem with Lydia. “Oh,” Lydia says, at the same time that Stiles says, “ _Oh_ ,” in response to Derek’s face.

The back of Derek’s neck has turned red. “My—therapist,” Derek says, sounding like he’s speaking through gritted teeth. Stiles has long-standing acquaintance with that particular tone of Derek’s voice. “Her office is in Bishop’s Corner.”

“What’s her name?” Stiles asks. When Kira and Lydia shoot him identical unimpressed looks, he elaborates, “Your therapist? What’s her name.”

“Naomi Pendergast,” Derek finally says. Stiles absolutely knows that he cannot throw stones re: terrible names, but, god, what a terrible name. “She’s at—this conference thing, though, so I met with another psychologist at her office.”

When Derek pauses here, Stiles prods, “ _Name_?”

“Paula Thomas,” Derek says, reluctantly, like wild horses have been directly applied to this situation.

Stiles echoes, “Paula Thomas. Now, was that freaking hard?”

Allison, who’s been using the laminated map of Beacon Hills like a crutch to keep herself from falling into an exhausted stupor, jerks upright at this. “Paula Thomas?” she repeats. “Isn’t she a witch?”

“Yes,” says Derek, after a lengthy pause.

Feeling melodramatic, Stiles knocks his notebook to the floor with a sweep of his hand. It’s left him holding his pen awkwardly, so he flings that at Derek’s sulky floating body. “Are you fucking kidding me?” he demands, as the pen arches through Derek’s chest and hits the wall behind him. “Your therapist is a witch and it literally didn’t occur to you that maybe she had something to do with your _Ghostbusters_ reenactment?”

“What about this is evocative of _Ghostbusters_ , exactly?” Derek points out.

This is so impressively off topic that Stiles has to pause for a minute to appreciate it, which turns out to be enough time for Cora to mutter, “What the fuck does _Ghostbusters_ have to do with anything?” under her breath.

Derek shoots Stiles a triumphant glare, jabbing a finger in his sister’s direction like he probably wouldn’t if she could see him. “Oh, shut up,” Stiles says. “Is she in her office tomorrow? Do you know?”

As Danny goes to rustle up a phone number or some office hours, Stiles leaves Derek to his floating angst and does a quick inventory of his hair samples. He has his and Cora’s and Lydia’s, the latter FedEx’d to the Chicago apartment a week ago, each of them wrapped with red ribbon and in a Ziploc baggie in the front pocket of his backpack. Scott turns out to have his, Isaac, and Allison’s, the three braid together and tied in a ring, as they have been for the last three years. Danny and Liam have theirs separately—according to Liam, they’re “taking it slow”; Danny calls it “not seriously dating someone still in college”—tucked into a fold of parchment paper in Danny’s laptop bag.

“It’s at home, sorry,” Kira tells Stiles when he’s made it to her. She’s still running through Derek’s schedule, even though they’ve probably found the source of Derek’s recent ghostliness. Back when Kira had first joined the gang, they’d done a lot of stuff off-the-cuff, and it’d gone wrong easily 90% of the time due to a combination of being idiot teenagers and a fundamental lack of know-how re: supernatural means and motives. They’ve gotten better over the years, coalescing into something vaguely resembling a functional werewolf pack, but red herrings aren’t totally unheard of. “I can call Jackson, though? Ask him to bring it by? Although—I mean, it’d be Lydia, calling him. He’s still mad that I won the mock trial last month.”

“What a baby,” Stiles says, practically by rote at this point. “It’s fine, I can come by tomorrow to pick it up. I have to go home at some point, to get Dad and Melissa’s. Fuck, and Jackson’s.” Stiles plucks the pen out of Kira’s hand and scribbles the list of names across the back of his hand. “He’s so useless. I wish the pack in London had kept him.”

This is not the first time Stiles has wished this aloud. Cora snorts audibly, like she can at all throw stones about being a moody werewolf with a tendency to flounce out of arguments she can’t win. Lydia has a type.

“If I’m not home, you have a key,” Kira says brightly. “It’s in the envelope by the front door, on your left when you walk in.”

Stiles dutifully adds this to the essay growing on the back of his hand, and then he returns to Kira her pen. For a person who’d been actively possessed for significant portion of his junior year of high school, Stiles has bounced back pretty well, but his short-term memory has never been able to get back to what it was before the nogitsune. “I’ve got to go by Deaton’s and pick up some stuff for tomorrow; are you guys good here?”

It’s Scott who waves him off. “I’ll text you,” he says, attention turned to Allison, who’s quietly reeling off what she knows about witches in general and Paula Thomas in particular, thumbing through the copy of the bestiary that she keeps on her iPad.

Stiles is almost done packing up his notebook and office supplies before he realizes there’s a problem; he’s turning towards Derek’s corner of sadness, impulsively framing an invitation for a field trip, when Derek says, “Don’t worry about it. I’m going to—get some sleep.”

“How?” Stiles points out. “You pass through furniture.”

“I’ll sit down,” Derek says, defensively, like Stiles is going to deduct ten percent off of an essay for his answer. “Or—go upstairs.”

“ _How_?” Stiles demands. “If you can punch through your couch, how are you supposed to climb a set of stairs?”

“Well, I haven’t fallen through the floor,” Derek says prissily. He’s easily three inches off of the floor, now, his arms folded across his chest. Stiles wonders abstractly if Derek can still feel his limbs, if sleeping in his characteristically tight pants is going to be uncomfortable or if his clothes are just as incorporeal to him as they are to everybody else. He kind of wants to ask, but years of secondhand observation and being tangentially friends with Derek—first through Scott, reluctantly, and then through _Kira_ , of all people—has taught him that asking Derek uncomfortable and off-topic questions isn’t a great idea even when Derek is in a good mood.

“I—” Stiles tries, not sure how he’s going to finish but knowing nonetheless that he has a point to make, namely that he’s going to feel guilty as hell about leaving Derek on his own in a room full of people that can’t see him or talk to him.

“Tell them to leave in an hour,” Derek interrupts, rolling his eyes and huffing and making a big deal out of this apparent confession. “I’m not a Dickensian orphan, Stiles.”

Stiles says, loudly, “Derek says you all can stay here as long as you like,” and he instinctually flinches when Derek takes a threatening step towards him. Lying to a roomful of werewolves is always a useless gesture, but it gets his point across.

“Go _away_ ,” Derek says.

“Take a chill pill, Oliver Twist,” Stiles advises as he leaves. Oliver is literally the only Dickensian orphan that Stiles can name off the top of his head; to judge from the way that Derek smirks, he knows it, too.

~

Scott texts Stiles very early the next morning, at that sweet spot that could be reached from either no sleep or up too early. _Appointment at nine. Can you take Derek?? Lyd says office warded, prob only you & ghost (????) can get in._

 _If it’s warded, how did Derek get in for his appointment?_ Stiles texts back. He has to awkwardly drape himself across the bedside table in the guest bedroom to reach the outlet where his phone is charging. He also has to squint to see his phone’s keyboard; he’s probably going to need glasses soon.

_Conditional removal? I don’t know, but if things go bad you’ll need to break them for us to help._

Nothing says a Saturday morning in Beacon Hills like a good old-fashioned adrenaline rush at 5:17 AM. “Uuuuugh,” Stiles groans into the crook of his elbow.

 _Allison thinks it won’t be bad; she says Paula’s pretty straight & narrow for a witch. No problems with her before_.

Stiles’ normal response to this would be “where have I heard that before??” with a list of the last twelve times someone claimed a supernatural monster wouldn’t be bad, right before it attempted to disembowel Derek or throw Isaac through a window, but Allison has a smidge less naïveté and way more than a smidge of street smarts when it comes to double-crosses.

_I’ll pick up Derek at 8:30. You still at the loft? Announce that loudly or something._

_Told him,_ Scott sends back. _Go back to sleep! Sorry for waking you up_.

 _No prob, dude_ , Stiles sends back in a garbled rush—it’s one of his shortcut phrases, programmed into every phone he’s ever owned, because he tends to type it too fast and send something like ‘ _nk prneb dus_ ’—and then he flops back into bed, leaving his phone to vibrate on the floor with Scott’s response. For a few wistful seconds, Stiles thinks of fall breaks past, when he’d been able to sleep in and share a companionable breakfast or two with his dad between shifts, and then he falls asleep between blinks.

~

About three minutes into the meeting that Stiles is mediating between Derek and his temporary witch therapist, Stiles sincerely wishes that the wards had actually held against Derek and that only Stiles needed to be a participant to this conversation.

“Do you need me to—prove it?” Stiles had offered, after Paula Thomas had shut the door on her vaguely curious-looking administrative assistant and kicked out a chair for Stiles to sit in. “That Derek is here, I mean.” He is, floating between Stiles and the witch and looking both exhausted and bitterly terrified. Apparently he needed Stiles present to even leave the loft, and even then it’d been touch-and-go for a while about whether he’d be able to sit in the passenger seat of Scott’s car while it moved.

Paula says, “No,” and clicks a few things on her computer. “I know what happened to him.”

“Because—you did it,” Stiles clarifies. Paula is wearing a ratty sweatshirt and a pair of faded skinnies; she looks like one of the freshmen in the Intro to European Lit class that Stiles occasionally TAs when he needs the cash. She does not, in fact, look like a therapist. At least, she doesn’t look like any therapist that Stiles has ever seen in a professional setting.

She looks bored, in fact. “He told me that sometimes it felt like he wasn’t ‘there.’” She puts _there_ in scare quotes. Stiles finds them intensely annoying; maybe this is what it feels like to be Derek. She half-turns and addresses the vague area where Derek is floating, although she’d made it clear when they’d first arrived that she couldn’t see or hear him. “You were sad. So, I helped. I showed you who sees you. Like, do you want a fucking engraved invitation to his ass? Because I don’t do nonconsensual shit like that.”

More importantly: “How did you get a PhD?” Stiles wants to know. “Did you, you know, magic one up?”

“No, dipshit,” Paula says, tilting her head towards the diploma framed on the wall behind her. “I went to fucking Yale and passed all my classes.”

“Sorry,” Stiles says, “just, you know. It’s probably tempting.”

Paula rolls her eyes. “Rule number one of doing magic is that you don’t get shit by being lazy. Energy is conserved; you get back what you put in. What, you think a spell can tell me how to help people? It doesn’t. I went to school and now I use my magic sometimes when the case is really dire.” She looks in Derek’s general direction again. “Case in point, Mr. Tragedy here. I put a spell on him, but it was Yale that taught me that he needed a swift kick in the ass.”

“Is that what this is?” Stiles asks. “Just to clarify: I’m the kick in the ass?”

“No, idiot,” Paula says slowly. “You’re the reward. The _spell_ is the kick in the ass.”

Derek looks about three seconds from promising to rip out her throat, and since Stiles would like to leave this office without being spelled to within an inch of his life, he reaches out and grabs Derek’s arm. His hand passes through it, of course, but he hopes Derek gets the point.

“Thanks, for that,” Stiles says with only a small amount of sincerity. “The kick. Derek can need those. Is there, um, a reverse kick? For once sense has been had?”

Paula’s face indicates to Stiles that she thinks he was born under a rock. “Spells of benefit have mechanisms built into them to ensure that they are eventually broken,” she says. “Who the hell taught you magic? A druid?”

That’s clearly both sarcastic and rhetorical, so Stiles says nothing.

“If he fulfills the terms, he goes back to normal,” she says. “Congratulations, don’t send me an invitation to the wedding, please return to your original psychologist so I can get back to my fucking job.”

“Are you allowed to do that?” Stiles asks. “Just, like, meet somebody and cast a spell on them and then tell them not to come back? You’re a therapist, for Christ’s sake.”

“I don’t do werewolves,” she says.

When Stiles delays too long, she adds, “ _Get out_ ,” in that creepy _Exorcist_ voice that witches use right before they start randomly spell-casting. Stiles accordingly gets out, lest he end up turned into a frog. Derek follows behind him; Stiles holds the door, so Derek doesn’t have to go through the indignity of floating through it. Paula’s admin clearly thinks Stiles is nuts for just standing there, holding the door, but Stiles doesn’t really care what anybody in this office thinks of him.

“Is that seriously okay?” he demands of Derek when they’re back in the car, the cavalry dispersed via text, Stiles angrily yanking on his seatbelt. “I thought tough love was a thing that psychologists were only allowed to display in movies.”

“Sometimes witches and werewolves have clashes. They can kill entire packs or covens, and hunters don’t get involved because the werewolves technically aren’t killing humans,” Derek says. He sounds sad about it, like Derek only gets when the anger has been bled out of him and he’s just exhausted by his entire existence. Stiles hates it when Derek gets like that; it feels too much like giving up. “If she doesn’t like werewolves, that’s probably why.”

“So? That doesn’t give her license to be shit at her job,” Stiles says.

Derek says, “Therapists can’t turn off their own personal problems at will,” in a voice so dejectedly flat that Stiles hits the brakes in response, startling the minivan behind them and causing a cascade of furious honking.

Stiles leans out of the window and shouts, “Go around me!”

“Get out of the middle of the road!” the woman in the minivan bawls back.

“Stiles,” Derek says.

“Seriously!” Stiles shouts, poking his entire chest out of the window. “I’m not moving! Just go around me, for fuck’s sake!”

“ _Stiles_ ,” Derek says.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” the woman in the minivan shrieks. “Just park on the shoulder! Other people use this road too, asshole!”

“ _Go AROUND_ ,” Stiles yells. He turns back to Derek and tells him, “Don’t you fucking dare say that it is fine that your therapist has issues with werewolves and therefore gave you the world’s shittiest spell in response. You don’t deserve that, okay?”

The woman in the minivan honks repeatedly; it drowns out whatever she’s yelling.

Derek says, “Stiles, just pull over.” He doesn’t look any less miserable, which means he probably still thinks that he deserved getting the world’s worst substitute therapist. Nobody deserves a shitty therapist. Stiles did the shitty therapist thing, and now he has a fucking tumor of darkness on his soul. Even if those two things were not directly related, Stiles still has a point. He knows he does.

“No,” Stiles says furiously. “I know I make fun of you for the damsel thing, because it’s fucking hilarious, but you never _deserve_ any of that happening to you. Not any more, at least. You used to be kind of a dick, but I think you make it work for you, now.”

Presumably finally understand that Stiles is being sincere, the woman in the minivan pulls around and passes Stiles. She flips him off as she goes, her horn blaring, and it leaves Stiles and Derek alone. Stiles pulls his torso out of the open window; his chest hurts a little from having the seat belt pulled across it, but he’ll live.

“Not everything is—uncompromising,” Derek says uncomfortably. He’s sitting about a half inch below the seat; he must not be concentrating. Stiles remembers very clearly that he thought all of this was cool yesterday, but he’s getting kind of sick of Derek being incorporeal.

“Don’t make excuses,” Stiles says tightly. Belatedly, he remembers all of the shit that he’s absorbed from Scott via somewhat unwilling osmosis, about being respectful of people’s boundaries and issues, and he adds, “I mean. You shouldn’t have to make excuses for somebody being an asshole to you. Especially somebody in a position of power like that. It’s total shit.”

Derek looks at his hands for three or four seconds, and then he flicks Stiles a little glance out of the corner of his eye, before staring out of the front windshield. “Sure,” he says eventually. “Lots of things are.”

Stiles makes little claws out of his fingers and mimes wrapping them around Derek’s throat. “You are so _annoying_ ,” he growls, shaking his hands back and forth. “I just can’t even deal with you right now. I’m going to drop you off at home so I can do my Halloween thing and then we’re going to regroup in a few hours and—figure out how to solve your therapist’s stupid riddle test thing.”

Stiles is pretty sure he’s already solved the riddle. Paula hadn’t really been beating around the bush or anything.

Derek might blush, but it’s hard for Stiles to tell; when Derek moves his head, Stiles can see something stay behind and it makes him dizzy for a few seconds until he realizes that it’s not Derek’s hair; he can see the edge of the passenger side window through Derek’s head.

 _Fuck_ , Stiles mouths. He shifts gears and takes off in a squeal of tires that would normally result in Derek bitching him out for at least three minutes about tire maintenance and respect for your vehicle. Derek stays silent, though, and Stiles drives a little faster.

~

Greg is waiting for Stiles, lurking just like generations past of inbred Argent ancestors, propped against the hood of his car as if Google Earth is going to come by and put a photograph of him on a fetish calendar for plaid enthusiasts.

“Seriously?” says Stiles, to the ceiling of Scott’s car. He briefly considers just driving off, but he needs to get his backpack full of supplies and pee before he heads out to the preserve.

With extreme reluctance, Stiles unbuckles his seat belt and climbs out of the car.

“Hey,” Greg says, raising a hand in a half-wave. He has no idea how lucky he is that Stiles’ dad is in the middle of working a double—mischief night in Beacon Hills, oh, the memories—and not here to plug him full of rubber bullets.

“What,” Stiles says tonelessly.

Greg is taller than Stiles by a few inches, blond and stubbly, and his favorite color of plaid (blue) makes his eyes look like Frodo’s. Stiles hadn’t really been impressed by Greg, at first, because usually new Argents coming to town was a sign of impending death, but Greg had turned out to be relatively harmless in the supernatural sense.

“You know what,” Greg says, still pleasantly. “It’s been five years.”

“And yet,” Stiles points out, “ _still_ not long enough.”

Greg is still leaning against his car, both hands now back in the pockets of his jeans. He has to squint at Stiles; the sun as chosen to come out in force and it’s turned Greg’s entire head of hair into some kind of reflective helmet. “Come on, Stiles,” he says. “There’s being upset with somebody, and then there’s nursing a pointless grudge to the point of absurdity.”

“Exclusive,” Stiles says loudly, slamming the car door shut behind him. “Adjective, meaning _the point in a monogamous relationship when you are no longer sticking your dick into anything and everything that moves_.”

Like Stiles hadn’t just made the only point that matters, Greg says, “My grandparents are dead. I want to move out here, closer to the family I have left, but Allison says that I’m not allowed to be in the state of California for longer than two days unless you give me permission. Seriously, Stiles? Are you twelve?”

Stiles’ favorite part about Greg had been that he was big and hard to move; when Stiles had pushed him around, Greg had pushed back. That no longer seems like such a great thing, when Greg is standing between Stiles and the magical ritual he needs to complete before it hits four and Beacon Hills Preserve becomes infested with mischief-seeking teenagers.

“As the injured party, I’m allowed reparations,” Stiles says. “Like, for example, the state of California. You can live literally anywhere else.”

“I want to live here,” Greg says mildly. “Near my cousin and her husband.”

“You should have considered that,” Stiles points out, “before you cheated on me.” He’s so fucking tired—physically, because he’s been sleep-deprived for months, first because of his thesis and then this GhostWatch business; but mentally, too, after having to walk Derek up to his loft so he wouldn’t fall through the cement steps of his apartment building—and it threads through his voice, draining the cheery hate out of it.

With a certain degree of gentle steel—Allison’s perfected this tone, but Greg isn’t bad at it—Greg says, “Stiles, do you really want to talk about this again? It was wrong, but we—know why. We both know. It’s unfair of you.”

In a flagrant attempt to ruin Greg’s coolness, Stiles says, a hair too loudly, “What was _really_ unfair was coming by your apartment and finding that guy with his hands down your pants—”

“—Stiles _—_ ” Greg tries to interrupt, probably because a few of Stiles’ dad’s neighbors are getting interested in this conversation. Mrs. Anderson has been arranging the same handful of Tootsie Pops in the bowl on her porch for the last three minutes.

“—and then you insisting that I was emotionally unavailable, like that’s an excuse that people use outside of _Desperate Housewives_ for why they cheat—”

“— _STILES_ ,” Greg says, getting a little angry now. There’s an embarrassed flush on his cheeks and in his ears. “Don’t—I wasn’t making that up, you know that it’s true—you were fucking crazy about that guy. You spent a _week_ sleeping at his apartment.”

“Because he was being harassed!” Stiles points out shrilly.

“Everybody told me to look out for Lydia,” Greg continues, “but that was complete shit. The entire time we dated, you were in love with somebody else, and then it became my fault when I didn’t want to deal with that anymore. You’re such a—” Greg sighs and pushes a hand through his perfect fall of golden hair. “Look. We’re not nineteen anymore. Can you lift the stupid ban on this state?”

Stiles hasn’t actually cared about Greg or his feelings for at least four and a half years; what remains of Greg and their brief and terrible romance is Stiles’ wounded pride and that nagging memory of Greg yelling about Stiles’ inability to connect with people. It had been close enough after the nogitsune and the tumor of darkness for it to bite at Stiles’ insecurities, and he’d erupted in a badly overdramatic way. He knows that. He’s not an idiot.

That doesn’t mean he wants to look at Greg or run the risk of running into him at Raley’s, of course, but that’s probably the bitterness speaking.

“ _Ugh_ ,” Stiles groans. “Fine, whatever. Move to California, date a bunch of new people and cheat on them. Be my guest. Just—leave, please. I have so much shit to deal with today that has nothing to do with you.”

With hunterly perception, probably, Greg asks, “It’s—him, right? Still balls-deep in problems?”

“I am so serious,” Stiles tells him, looking dead into Greg’s glowing hobbit eyes. “So much shit, and, like, no time for you, or this.” He gestures between them. “Whatever this is.”

With that Stiles heads inside, leaving Greg behind to figure out how to get his classic car out of the driveway without hitting Scott’s Toyota or Mrs. Anderson’s hydrangeas. He’d gotten exactly what he wanted without ceding an inch on his party line about their breakup being at least half Stiles’ fault; he can get his ugly boat of a car out on his own.

~

Loving Derek—stupid, adult-person loving; not hero-worship, just a kind of unhappy resignation, settled deep into Stiles’ bones that this is a Problem and it’s Not Going Away—has been Stiles’ lackluster companion for the last five years. Unless certain assholes bring it up, Stiles doesn’t even consciously think about it anymore, now that it’s evolved like a Pokémon out of constant lust into exasperated affection.

Stiles had spent the entirety of his winter break, freshman year of college, wanting to bite a ring of bruises around Derek’s neck and kiss Derek hard enough to _bleed_ and he’d jerked off so much that he’d ended up searching spermatogenesis mutations on PubMed out of belligerent curiosity. When he came back in the summer to pick up a job at the station and get some gas money, suddenly it was less about biting and bleeding and fantasies of angry hate sex; he’d spent most of June trying not to think about whether or not Derek was sleeping enough, as well as prodigiously masturbating.

It had turned out that Derek had _not,_ in fact, been sleeping enough, because a mare was sitting on his chest at night, sucking out his life force through his dreams. By the end of July, the mare was banished back to her scary nightmare realm and Stiles was trying to trick himself out of being in love with Derek by dating Greg.

Stiles has laid some pretty terrible plans, in his day, but the Greg thing sort of takes the cake.

~

In a personal record, Stiles is cleared out the preserve by 4:15, hair circles burned and wards dutifully renewed, having been spotted by zero teenagers. He celebrates by stopping at Target on his way to Derek’s loft and picking up a package of cream cheese, two cans of chili, a bag of shredded cheddar, and three different types of Tostitos.

“Hey!” Stiles calls as he bangs into the loft, letting the door slide shut behind him. “I’m using your oven to make dip, okay?”

Usually Stiles threatening to cook evokes in Derek a terrible anger—seriously, you set off the fire alarm _once_ —but the loft is completely silent. Stiles makes a point to rattle all of the pans as he digs a casserole dish out of the cabinet above the stove; he uses the electric can opener, even though he doesn’t really understand how it works, because it’s louder than the hand-held one. Once the dish of chili and cheese is in the oven, though, and the bags of Tostitos artfully arranged on Derek’s small, achingly hipster kitchen table, Stiles can no longer ignore that Derek is missing.

He sets the digital timer on the stove for twenty minutes and goes to Derek’s favorite corners of pathos—his bed, the back corner behind the couch, the wall-facing curve of the spiral staircase—but Derek is nowhere to be found. It doesn’t actually take very long to search the loft, which is a blessing now for all that it’s a curse when they find themselves under attack, and eventually Stiles decides to go upstairs.

Despite Stiles’ personal motto being that boundaries are for other people, Stiles still feels a little tremor of apprehension as he ascends. He’s never been upstairs, as there’s not much reason to do so when everything important is on the first level; he doesn’t really know what to expect.

The spiral staircase empties out into a short hallway with three doors, two of which turn out to be linen closets when Stiles opens them. One of them is actually being used for linens—an extra set of bed sheets and towels, both in a color perhaps best described as ‘despairing grey’—and the other is packed with miscellaneous junk: buckets of cleaning supplies, a pair of both scuffed winter boots and spotless black leather dress shoes, an entire shelf of hair products.

The last door is at the end of the hallway. Stiles doesn’t know what to expect, other than shades of Bluebeard, but when he flicks the light switch it turns out to be some kind of _Architectural Digest_ wet dream of a master bathroom—spotless tile work in shades of pale blue and white, enormous claw-footed bathtub, and an entire north-facing wall of glass blocks, artfully rippled to preserve modesty. The light fixtures and faucets are burnished brass and look both old and expensive, which are not two adjectives Stiles would ever use to describe Derek’s loft.

At first pass, the bathroom looks empty. Stiles honestly doesn’t know where to look next—the basement, if Derek fell through the stairs again, trying to get to street level?—but he takes a second, more prurient look-around for any blackmail-grade material he could later use to tease Derek out of a wretched mood. It’s then that he sees that the porcelain of the tub is reflecting oddly under the overhead lights.

“Derek?” Stiles squawks, his voice echoing off of the tiled floors and walls and coming back to him at an unflatteringly high pitch.

“What,” Derek says tonelessly.

Stiles slumps against the doorframe and tries to restart his goddamn heart. “You fucking scared me, that’s what,” he says. “Shit. Is it—getting worse? Why is it getting worse? We know how to fix this!”

It’s a rhetorical question—obviously Derek would not be more transparent if matters were improving—but Derek’s specter turns and nails Stiles with an extremely unpleasant look.

“No,” he says, “I’m better, obviously.”

Stiles rolls his eyes. “Hilarious,” he says. “Can you—how did you get up here?”

Derek shrugs, breaking eye contact, which means he’s embarrassed. “I came up through the ceiling. Have you figured out what Paula meant, then?”

Apparently this is the day for rhetorical questions. Stiles pushes himself off of the doorframe and comes into the bathroom. Closer, at a different angle, Derek is slightly more visible. The bathtub is large enough that Stiles thinks they could both fit in there, even taking into account the breadth of Derek’s chest and Stiles’ own stupid gazelle legs; it dwarfs Derek a little bit, which is made easier by Derek’s hunched shoulders. “How do we want to do this? Does it—do I have to talk about it?”

It’s impossible to keep the distaste and unhappiness out of Stiles’ voice. He’d done the vocal crush thing to the point where it ceased being embarrassing, back when he’d been stalking Lydia and couching it in cute terms, and he’s sort of enjoyed _not_ being the pathetic butt of a million jokes with Derek. They both know, they just never mention it. It works for them. It’s a _system_.

Derek’s shoulders creep up to his ears. He looks like a projection, a PowerPoint presentation thrown up on a white screen. “I don’t have another choice,” he says, voice strong and bitter. It’s an awful counterpoint to a person hiding in a fucking bathtub. Stiles hates literally every element of this.

He leans his butt against the sink and holds himself in place by gripping the sides of the bowl. His hands need something to do and he needs something stabilizing. “Right,” he says, and then he pauses to noisily clear his throat. “Well. I’m in love with you. I see you, I guess, if by ‘see you,’ you mean ‘want to suck on your tongue’—or, whatever. Fuck, we _know_ this, why do we have to— _talk_ about it?”

“Therapy,” Derek points out drily. He doesn’t look any more solid than he’d been a minute ago.

“I realize it works for you,” Stiles says, “and I’m, like, deep in the deepest of glass houses re: talking a lot, but—I fucking _hated_ therapy.”

Derek admits, “So do I, sometimes. But it’s—what I need.”

That’s probably not something Derek would have allowed eight years ago, which undoubtedly speaks to how useful a psychologist has been for Derek, but Stiles has gone flushed and irritable and he wants to leave, right now, before he has to do some kind of embarrassing magical ritual like kiss Derek.

Stiles digs his fingers into the sink hard enough to make his nail beds ache. “No offense, but your substitute therapist is a dick.”

“Yeah,” Derek agrees. He looks at his hands, dangling between his knees, and then up at Stiles. “I don’t think that this is going to work.”

“For fuck’s sake,” Stiles says, and he knows his voice is breaking open. “I’m not going to kiss you, okay? I am drawing a fucking line and that line is right fucking there. I’m not kissing you, even if I’m the one that can _see_ you or whatever, and you’re going to stop being a ghost. Right now.”

Derek does not instantly obey Stiles’ command, which would have been really cool but also surprising. His face is drawn and awful.

“This doesn’t even make sense,” Stiles continues. “She said—like, _see_ you, with all of this stupid inflection on it, but that is literally the vaguest metaphor I have ever heard, and I’ve cast some pretty fucking vague rhymes in my day.” Usually on Halloween. “I don’t even see you that much, literally—you and Scott and Isaac are always being wolf brothers and bonding over rabbit hunting or whatever, and you and Kira hang out, like, _all_ the time. Allison and I used to think that you two were secretly dating, before Kira told us that she was going out with Caitlin.”

Derek scoffs, “ _Kira_?”

“Yeah, right?” Stiles says. “Dumbest shit to assume, but I did. Kira’s your best friend. I’m just the—idiot who fell in love with you at an impressionable age. Kira should be here, doing this.” Stiles is three seconds away from saying _friendship is magic_ and having to immediately disavow himself as a brony when he sees the confusion on Derek’s face. “Figuratively,” he clarifies. “Like, figuratively, it’s Kira who sees you, the most. Right? You guys were like Scott and me in second grade: insta-bond.”

“Seriously?” Derek says with a small grimace. “ _Insta-bond_? You’re still in second grade.”

“Magic likes reciprocities,” Stiles says over the peanut gallery’s useless contributions to the matter at hand. “What good is a one-sided love declaration? And Paula was talking about energy conservation. Jesus. I bet Lydia would’ve torn her a new one.”

Stiles’ face still feels hot and he can’t really release his death-grip on the sink, but he’s managed to talk his way around his feelings for Derek without needing to go into embarrassing detail or pull a creepy stunt, which is making this experience already leagues better than some of Stiles’ previous attempts at romance. He catches himself thinking, _this isn’t that bad_ , which is like line item number one on the global recipe for disaster.

“I think you should—go,” Derek says, now that Stiles hasn’t spoken for a few seconds. “This isn’t working.”

“She said it was me,” Stiles points out. “I am the spell-breaking apparatus. I’m the—reward?” Which is frankly the only part that doesn’t really make sense, but Stiles is operating on the assumption that ‘reward’ is a metaphor here, just like ‘see.’ Stupid magic and stupid fucking metaphors. Stiles feels a lot of sympathy right now for the people who’d had to interpret the drugged ramblings of ancient oracles and inevitably fucked it up.

“Let’s not talk about it any more,” Derek says in a way that’s more of an order than a suggestion. The porcelain behind his ears is slightly pinker than the rest of the tub.

“I’m sorry,” Stiles says, “is my declaration of love embarrassing for you? How the fuck do you think I feel?”

“I know you don’t—really—” Derek tries.

“What? Want to talk about something we’ve spent the last five years completely ignoring? Yeah, you’re right. I _don’t_ want to talk about this, especially since it’s—obviously—you know. One-sided. But what’s the other option, you becoming spiritually one with your apartment? It’s embarrassing to spew my feelings on you, but I’d rather be embarrassed than you be dead.”

Derek, who hadn’t really been moving much before, suddenly stops doing anything at all. Stiles can actually see his eyelashes now, on an individual basis instead of as a dark smear. There’s a too-long lock of hair curled over his brow, like Superman. “Sorry, obviously—what?”

“Fuck you,” Stiles says brightly. “ _Obviously_.”

Derek curls his fingers over the rim of the tub, a gesture for lifting himself up that proves fruitless when his hand goes straight through the side. He doesn’t seem to realize, doing it against almost absently. “You— _see_ me, but it’s—one-sided?”

“Oh my fucking god,” Stiles says, “please get your body back so I can kick you in the nuts.” He has no idea how Paige fell in love with asshole teenage Derek, since Stiles’ sincerest wish is that he could right now plug Derek full of wolfsbane bullets. Stiles’ whole face is burning; he thinks he’s sweating, because the skin of his forehead feels simultaneously damp and on fire, which is what summer must feel in Mississippi.

Third time’s apparently the charm. Derek gets to his feet, holding his fingers an inch or two above the tub as he climbs out of it. He takes a lot of care to avoid the edges of the tub, which is so— _Derek_. For fuck’s sake. The man can walk through furniture, and it is completely wasted on him.

Out of the bathtub, Derek looks like some kind of Photoshop filter mishap come to life; his skin is lined with the tiles of the wall behind him, his forehead and hair tinted blue from where the pattern changes near the ceiling. “Can you say it again?” he asks.

“No,” Stiles says. “Fuck you.”

“I’m serious,” Derek says, more intense than aggressive. “Say it again.”

“I’m in love with you,” Stiles spits out, so quickly that the words run together. “You fucking bag of fucking dicks.”

Derek turns solid so quickly that it’s dizzying. It’s similar to what Stiles had thought Apparating would look like when he read Harry Potter for the first time; Derek is a pale ghost, transparent and mostly gone below the calves, and then he’s not.

Stiles hasn’t see Derek in the flesh since July, when he’d come to Chicago for Cora’s birthday. His hair’s longer, to go with the neatly trimmed beard that makes his mouth look small and pink.

They look at each other for a while, lengthy ticking seconds, and there’s this stupid adrenaline surge, coursing through Stiles like a crescendo, hitting his heart and making his whole chest resonate with it. It feels like anticipation, maybe, but Stiles’ brain hasn’t caught up with _why,_ yet, just that he can hear the blood pounding in his head, and then Derek says, “Is something burning?”

~

“I told you,” Derek is yelling, hovering behind Stiles as he uses a pair of potholders and a spatula to scrape exploded pieces of cheese-encrusted beans off of the inside of the oven, “not to use my kitchen, Stiles!”

“It’s dip!” Stiles replies, jabbing in Derek’s general direction with the spatula. “It’s not like it’s a chemical spill or a radiation leak or something. It is cream cheese and pinto beans.” As he returns to his scraping, he adds, “Maybe some jalapenos. I don’t know, I’ve never had this brand of chili before. It smelled pretty good.”

“It smells,” Derek says through his teeth, “like _shit_.”

“That’s because your sensitive werewolf nose is sad about the little bit of it that burned.” Besides, whose fault was it that Stiles had gotten distracted and missed the timer going off, exactly?

“You’re cleaning my entire oven,” Derek continues. “Then you’re cleaning that spatula.”

Stiles sloughs a spatula-ful of burnt cheese gloop into the casserole dish on the stovetop and rubs a bead of sweat off of his forehead with the bent crook of his wrist. He’d campaigned not to risk severe burns and heatstroke and wait until the oven cooled before attempting a rescue mission, but Derek had insisted that the cheese would be harder to remove after it hardened. He’s probably right, but it’s now a little after six on Halloween, and Stiles is on his knees on the floor in Derek’s kitchen, cleaning his oven _by hand_.

Under his breath, Stiles mutters, “I’m finally back in corporeal form thanks to the tireless dedication of my friend Stiles Stilinski and I know the perfect expression of gratitude! I’ll make him physically remove every iota of his celebration dip off of the inside of my oven, and I’ll watch him do it the whole time like a suspicious jail warden.”

“If I leave, you won’t finish,” Derek says. There’s a bunch of rustling and then a not-quite muffled noise of surprise. “Oh,” Derek says. “Are these—?”

“Well, they’re not for me,” Stiles says. “You know how I feel about lime chips.”

“Everyone who’s ever met you knows how you feel about lime chips,” Derek says, almost absently. Just like Stiles had anticipated, there’s the pop-squeal sound of the bag of Hint of Lime Tostitos being opened, and then quiet crunching. “I don’t understand how you think these are gross.”

“ _Unspeakably vile_ ,” Stiles corrects. He has to twist his torso to reach the back of the oven without burning himself. “I think, along with every other intelligent person on the face of the planet, that the best Tostitos are the ones shaped like little bowls.”

Derek chooses to crunch loudly on a chip instead of actually replying with words. There follows about thirty seconds of peaceable quiet, which Stiles spends fiddling with the wire racks, before Derek says, “You weren’t—lying. Before.”

This is a classic Derek Hale Question Disguised as a Statement of Fact. “No,” Stiles replies. The effort required to keep his voice breezy gets extracted from his hands; he slips and presses the exposed side of his forearm to the wall of the oven. “ _Fuck_. Why would you think I was lying? I seriously thought—you knew? Everyone knows.”

“Right,” Derek says dryly. “Between the silent treatment from Isaac and all that time I spend with Lydia, I’m definitely keeping up with gossip.”

With rising incredulity, Stiles settles back on his heels and faces Derek. “Dude,” he says. “I’m not, like—talking six months or something. Years. Everybody has known for years. I mean, Kira gave me the shovel talk at Dad and Melissa’s wedding.” It’d been really cute, too, until she’d stopped blushing, leaned forward, and promised Stiles that there wouldn’t be enough of him left for possession by an ant spirit if he hurt Derek. When Stiles had (reasonably) pointed out that it’d be a little difficult for him to hurt Derek when they weren’t even dating, Kira had given him a patronizing smile and gone off to dance with Cora.

“I didn’t,” Derek says, looking surprised. His eyebrows have a tendency to go loose when he’s feeling vulnerable; they tilt up in the middle and his mouth softens. “I mean. I thought—I thought everyone knew, about me. That I’m—you know.”

“Um,” Stiles says, “clearly not, no, I don’t,” even though he thinks he might.

Derek huffs overdramatically and puts the bag of Hint of Lime Tostitos back on the table. “That I’m in love with you,” he says. If that’s how exasperated Stiles had sounded earlier, no wonder Derek hadn’t believed him. “I thought you might’ve—not been sincere. Before.”

“Since when have I _ever_ lied to spare somebody’s feelings?” Stiles points out, which is a valid point but also kind of makes him sound like a sociopath. “I mean. I wasn’t. Lying.”

When Stiles had thought about this moment in his fantasies—usually when the Purple Line was particularly packed for his morning commute and he didn’t have enough elbow space to fiddle with his phone, or while medicated due to injuries sustained over the course of some supernatural disaster—he’d never really factored in the pervasive smell of burnt cheese or the existence of Derek’s incredibly twee oven mitts, which are shaped like cats and have embroidered whiskers on them.

“Good,” Derek says. “That’s—good.” He licks the first two fingers of his right hand, probably removing the hideous lime dust from them, and then he takes a purposeful step towards Stiles, who is kneeling on the floor in front of an oven that was very recently 400°F. He holds Stiles in some kind of hypnotic eye contact as he sinks into a crouch and peels off the cat oven mitts.

Derek, it turns out, is the kind of guy who moves slowly, interested in giving Stiles ample time to back out. Which: like Stiles is at _all_ the kind of guy who backs out. Derek blinks in long sweeps, giving Stiles plenty of time to watch his pupils dilate as he fits his right hand into the curve of Stiles’ neck, his thumb pressed to the hinge of Stiles’ jaw. By the time their mouths are close enough for Stiles to taste the fake citrus of his breath, he’s barely moving at all. He looks a little bit drugged, with his big pupils and his ragged breathing.

“Come on,” Stiles says hoarsely. “Let’s get this show on the road. I’ve never made out with a guy with a beard before.”

Derek says, “You’re hilarious,” and then he waits and lets Stiles come to him, impatient, and it turns out to have been a good move—if Derek had been the one tackling and Stiles the one sinking backwards, they both would’ve ended up in the oven with third-degree burns. Instead, Stiles scrapes his knees on the linoleum floor and Derek loses the top two buttons on his Henley to some godforsaken corner of the kitchen.

Stiles can’t taste anything except fucking Hint of Lime Tostitos for hours, even after Derek has scared off the last of the trick-or-treaters with his fang-flashing antics and he and Stiles split the final bite-sized Milky Way. It’s equal parts vile and fantastic.


End file.
